This is the S R Nathan eulogy that all civil servants should read

Mr Nathan influenced me even before I joined MFA. One of Mr Nathan’s best friends was the late Chia Cheong Fook who was also once Permanent Secretary of MFA. Mr Chia was my father’s best friend. I grew up vaguely conscious of Mr Nathan as a background presence — obviously a personality to be reckoned with, but without clear resolution. It was only in the earlier part of the 1970s that Mr Nathan acquired sharp focus in my consciousness. I was then pretending to study in the University of Singapore. I did something that could potentially have had serious ramifications — what I am never going to say, so don’t bother to ask. Nobody knew what I did except my fellow conspirators — or so I fondly believed — but things began to go pear-shaped and I thought I’d better come clean before everything crashed. I telephoned my father, then (Singapore’s Ambassador) in Moscow. Before I cou...